+ Good image quality even at the max res of 1600×1200.+ Smooth video at high resolution with relatively little bandwidth consumption (thanks to h264 encoding).+ Better than average lens (it even has a manual iris and some small manual zooming capability).

Cons:

- It stops responding to web requests after several hours and needs physically power-cycled. This kills it for practically all purposes. Maybe I got faulty hardware, or the latest firmware is unstable?- Setting the video resolution on the camera lower than native actually crops the video, so you won’t get the full field of view unless you have it at native resolution.- Cannot change the JPG compression level. A native resolution (1600×1200) picture is about 1 MB and a 640×480 picture is about 200kb. Even 320×240 is ~50kb. As such, pictures take roughly 5 to 10 times longer to transfer than they should.- The firmware it came with only allowed it to provide JPG pictures at 640×480. I had to upgrade the firmware to get 1600×1200 JPGs.- The firmware upgrade process does not let you upload a file through your browser. You have to point it at a server that has the firmware files (GrandStream provides one), then reboot the camera. The process isn’t foolproof and it took approximately 6 reboots before the camera managed to actually update its firmware.- Only Internet Explorer would play video. Firefox 4 couldn’t find the plugin. Maybe Firefox 3 would work. Also the plugin is unsigned so I had to change the internet security settings on every computer I wanted to install it on.

Other thoughts:

I want to try the previous firmware version to see if it lasts longer than a few hours, but apparently I have to set up a web server in order to do that. What a pain. I don’t have time for this!

[Edit:] I managed to downgrade to the previous firmware using tftp and the stability issue is no longer an issue. However, I am stuck with low res JPG images again, which makes the camera next to useless for the intended purpose.

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